Archive for April, 2017

On Saturday, April 22nd, I joined hundreds of people to march in the streets for Science. In was also Earth Day, and we were marching for Earth as well as Science. After chasing down materials an hour before the march, I made a sign that said “Science saves lives!”. This message was my own idea, and I liked it more than any that I had seen on the Web. I discovered that it was also an easy slogan to chant, and got people to chant it several times.

Science is under attack, by people who don’t want to believe that our existence is threatened by our own activities, or who feel that profit is more important than the future. Some people believe that Science is anti-spiritual, anti-religious, because their faith depends on miracles. I happen to believe that Science does not have all the answers, and that there are things which we cannot measure, or detect, which still have an impact on the Universe.

Science is not bad, or evil, it is neutral. It can be used to do harm, to destroy, but it also is an important part of survival. But Science can be hard for people to understand, and even intelligent, well-meaning people can get confused. Vaccines are beneficial, the square root of negative one does exist in mathematics, and electricity flows from negative to positive. Investigate, study, question. These are fundamental to the scientific process.

The extended family, tribe, or clan has been the support system of humanity for thousands of generations. In the United States, that support system is nearly extinct. Never before have parents been the sole, primary caregivers of their children. The breakdown in the behavior of youth is a direct result, I believe, of children not having elders available who have time on their hands to spend with children. This is most critical for children in the toddler stage, ages 2 to 5, when self-esteem, awareness of social history, and feelings of inclusiveness are developing.

Instead of putting children in daycare centers where a small number of young adults oversee 20, or even 30 children, I recommend that we establish daycare centers in assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and other places where there are many elders with time on their hands. This would benefit not only the children, but the elders as well, giving them a sense of connection with the future. Large concentrations of elders without any young people is totally unnatural, an environment where depression and despondency are to be expected.

Having high school-age young adults help with the toddlers and small children would provide the able-bodied people needed to ride herd on a group of rambunctious kids, while allowing the elders to spend time with the youngest children, listening to them, telling them stories, singing songs with them, and generally letting the children know that they are important, and are part of the group. And we could probably save some money in the process.

A friend has gotten me to think about the difference between studying to gain knowledge and learning how to access knowledge quickly. ‘In an era when I can look up practically anything, why should I spend years studying different subjects so that I can be tested upon them?’ is a paraphrase of what he said. He also once talked about living in an “effluent society”, but that is neither here nor there.

Human knowledge has far exceeded the ability of any one person to grasp. We need to decide what are the fundamentals that we must teach each other, what skills are so essential that we should group people together for hours at a time so that they can learn them. Simply knowing that knowledge exists is not the same as having the knowledge, and knowledge affects our actions and thoughts. But not all people are going to be receptive to the same knowledge, so we must choose a way to convey it that is flexible, with those who are interested being able to pursue something further. The ‘classroom’ has become one of the biggest impediments to education, in my opinion, because it stipulates that everyone is going to learn at the same rate, and in the same way.

Treating us as individuals means stepping away from the industrial ‘assembly line’ method of instruction. Focusing on a persons strengths, helping them to overcome weaknesses, developing their personalities, these are the role that the public school system must fulfill. We can have a room full of students, but we should not view them as a ‘class’. American society has gutted the family, destroying the network of relatives and friends that were responsible for the raising of the young for thousands of generations. Nurturing means showing the world to someone, while helping them to cope with it. The world is a vast mix of ideas, cold realities, and ignorance.

The electronic world offers us near instant feedback on our efforts, if we are strong enough to pay attention. Living in the cloud means being aware of each other in near real time. This promotes a group consciousness, a multi-mind, which can occur when a number of people are thinking about the same thing at the same time. We may be evolving into a single sentient organism, if some science fiction writers are correct, but we still need to get along with each other in the meantime, and schools are where we will learn how. People have to be taught how not to get caught up in emotions, how to say ‘no’ to themselves, and to others, and how to believe in themselves as people, with intrinsic value. We have to care about ourselves before we can really care about others.